How Printing Can Change Your Business's Advertising

Printing has become a lot more accessible to small businesses and even individuals these days. A lot of people can print onto materials from home via a heatpress for example. Sophisiticated printers have allowed individuals to print glossy flyers and leaflets from home too.

Now that we can, should we? I argue that for the sake of advertising and marketing, and with a healthy dose of discernment, yes we should, but for what I believe is a counter-intuitive reason.

The internet has disrupted the print industry massively. Everybody has the internet in their backpocket these days (their phone) so why print anything?

Well, how about: to stand out.

Yes, everybody is online these days, but paradoxically it's never been harder to actually make a good living online as a small business. I know, I've been running a small business online since the mid 1990s! There's a couple of reasons why it's never been harder to be a success online :-

1) competition
2) a funnelling of traffic from fewer and fewer sources.

This has made search engines like Google extremely difficult to be found on because there's never been more businesses competing for every single keyword.

So what's this got to do with print? It offers an opportunity for smart businesses to turn everything on its head: while every business is focusing online, why not take advantage of the relative quiet offline?

Let me give you an example: I have a friend who provides building services. He went around his local neighbourhood and did a leaflet drop through hundreds of letterboxes. Within days, he was inundated with work. He asked his customers why they chose him and not another builder. The consensus was that no other builder did a leaflet drop! Furthermore, a few said they were bewildered by the sheer numbers of builders they could find online. Who to choose? A printed leaflet showed them he was local and "real". It was a tangible advertisement they saw on their kitchen table or on top of their fridge everyday until they needed a builder.

The contrarian tactic is always a good one when there's a lot of competition. You can stand out by marketing with printed materials just at the point everybody is exclusively marketing online.

Trust me on this one: gaining marketshare in the multi-dimensional space known as "offline" is going to be the new big thing. Be among the first to catch on to this!

Article kindly provided by cherrillprint.co.uk